In Mandarin Chinese, reduplication is a very common feature. Its function is to create an informal, less direct or more cute version of a word with the same meaning. For example, 謝謝xièxie, “thanks”, is a reduplicated 謝xiè. However, when it comes to naming your relations, it could well be that these apparently reduplicated words came first and then got shortened, just like English “ma” and ‎“pa” are short versions of ‎“mama” and ‎“papa”.

Now mama, papa, baba, dada etc. are babble words, something that babies all over the world tend to produce without thinking about their parents and other relatives. (How on earth Finns got to use äiti and isä, is anyone’s guess. Here’s my own guess: Finnish is derived from Elvish, not the other way round, and elvish babies never babble.)

What I find interesting about Mandarin is that there are different babble words for different kinds of brothers, sisters, uncles and grandparents. Which is logical, if you think of it. For example, an older brother and a younger brother often have nothing in common. Calling them simply “brothers” is just silly.

When we hear or read something incomprehensible, we say “it’s all Greek to me”. Naturally, Greeks would use different expression. In Greek, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese and many other European languages, they say “it’s all Chinese to me”. Spanish go one step further: es chino básico, “it’s basic Chinese” (implying that you probably should forget about mastering intermediate-level Chinese). But you know what? We all know a bit of Chinese. Here are ten or twelve Chinese words that you should be familiar already, even if you didn’t realise that until now.

茶

茶chá: tea. Turkish çay and Russian чай are the variation on this theme. In Min Nan, the same word is pronounced as tê; thanks to the Dutch East India Company, this plant and drink is known in Europe as tea. 烏龍茶 / 乌龙茶, wūlóng chá, literally “black dragon tea”, is oolong tea.

道

道dào: a word of many meanings, among them “word”, “method”, “path”, “road”, “way”. Tao (or Dao), “The Way”, is a central concept of Taoism.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

風水

功夫

功夫gōngfu: another word with a variety of meanings, such as “time”, “effort”, “achievement”, “art”, “skill”. In the West, kung fu is mainly used to refer to Chinese martial arts, also called 武術 / 武术 wǔshù.

荔枝

荔枝lìzhī: lychee, Litchi chinensis. Once the delicacy at the Chinese Imperial Court, nowadays it is available in supermarkets all over the world.

麻將

麻將 / 麻将 májiàng (from 麻雀máquè, “sparrow”): the game of mahjong, believed to be developed by nobody else but that bird lover, Confucius.

人參

人參 / 人参 rénshēn (from 人 “man” and 參 / 参 “root”): ginseng, so called thanks to the human-like shape of its root.

Chinese, however, see nothing wrong in being excessively polite. The more excuse mes, can I asks and pleases, the better. Instead of rather blunt 你好吗 “How are you?” (literally “You good?”), you are more likely to hear 你吃饭了没, “Have you eaten rice yet?” — because if you did, things cannot be too bad. Interestingly, the polite response to 谢谢 🔊 “thank you” is 不客气 , literally “don’t be polite”. If you are at all interested in learning Chinese, you could do worse than start with a few polite expressions.

巴尔扎克

‘Ba-er-zar-ke’. Translated into Chinese, the name of the French author comprised four ideograms. The magic of translation! The ponderousness of the two syllables as well as the belligerent, somewhat old-fashioned ring of the name were quite gone, now that the four characters — very elegant, each composed of just a few strokes — banded together to create an unusual beauty, redolent with an exotic fragrance as sensual as the perfume wreathing a wine stored for centuries in a cellar.

Although there is no correlation between writing and speech in Chinese, how we speak does affect our way of thinking. Each language builds a fence around those who speak it from birth, imprisoning our thought within its vocabulary (and grammar) unless we find a way out. Freedom is achieved by becoming familiar with a second language. This new knowledge enables us to view our first language objectively from without, creating fresh insight while further enhancing the interplay between language and thought.

Because of the diversity of each nation’s history and culture, it is debatable whether there is any such thing as a universal code of logic. Concepts are expressed by words. If certain words are absent in a second language, the exact meaning of a particular concept expressed in the vocabulary of the first language may also be non-existent in the second, ‘foreign’ country and may not hold the same relevance there.

Chinese logic is not based on subject—predicate relationships but on correlative duality. Neither subject nor predicate is necessary in a Chinese sentence. Instead of saying, ‘Milk is white, but coal is not white’, we Chinese say, ‘White milk, black coal’. On many occasions, the subject is omitted altogether. In Chinese, we cannot say, ‘It snows’. Instead, we say, ‘Drop snow’.

By dispensing with the subject, Chinese thought takes a different path. Attention is concentrated not on the nature of the ‘thing in itself’ (Kant’s ‘das Ding an sich’) but on the total relational pattern of things in general.

Two words with opposite meanings are seldom placed together side by side in English. In contrast, we Chinese frequently use antonyms to represent a concept. Some common examples are:

As I was walking through Liverpool’s Chinatown, I saw a gentleman writing Chinese characters on a pavement with brush and water. I made a little video of his writing. I have no slightest idea what it’s all about, but then and there I thought I was witnessing an essence of pure art.